Free Digital Issue

Stealth Paint

The silver lining to this black economy is that people are becoming more independent. We’re pulling our own teeth, candling our ears, raising chickens and patching up our own footwear. Assisting us in our current quest for frugality while keeping the game rolling is the new Stealth Paint from Five Ten.

The Paint kit comes with a snuff-can of ground-up, recycled Stealth rubber. This is a fine, sticky rubber powder that you mix with the included tube of Barge cement, then slather onto your shoes to repair or even upgrade them. I coated the leather heels of a new pair of rock shoes with the paint. The process was simple and after a couple of hours of drying, the shoes had sticky rubber for heel hooking.

Stealth Paint has several advantages over the old standby shoe patch, Shoe Goo. For starters, Shoe Goo is slick, hard and only semi-flexible (sucks), while Stealth Paint is sticky and flexible (doesn’t suck). Stealth Paint is trickier to apply, but worth the bother. The paint comes with instructions and I suggest that you abide by them, especially the part about doing the business in a well-ventilated area. I agreed with everything on the sheet except I found that the 2:1 recommended mix of rubber to glue was too dry for my application, so I added more glue. Perfect. The kit also comes with a little plastic roller pin that you use to press and smooth the paint. Getting an even application is tricky—your patched-up shoes won’t win a beauty contest.

You can use the paint as I did to put sticky rubber on rock shoes where they have none, or you could use it to patch holes in rands and toe caps. I’d heard that you could also apply it to metal ice-tool shafts to give them sticky grips, so I tried that too, with mixed results. More experimentation is needed there. Other uses that spring to mind but that I have not yet tried include using the Paint to coat gloves, kneepads and even hand tape. If you’ve had good luck with any of these applications, please share by contacting Gear Guy on our website www.rockandice.com.

—DR

Stealth paint effectively patches holes in rands.

Works great for adding sticky rubber to any shoe where you might need it for hooking or jamming.

A big improvement over Shoe Goo.

Other potential uses are nearly unlimited.

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